Iran’s “Suspended” Nuke Program

I’m shocked – shocked – to learn that the 2007 NIE claim that Iran suspended its nuclear program in 2003 has been contradicted.

The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, has amassed evidence of a sophisticated Iranian nuclear weapons program that continued beyond 2003. This usually classified information comes courtesy of Germany’s highest state-security court. In a 30-page legal opinion on March 26 and a May 27 press release in a case about possible illegal trading with Iran, a special national security panel of the Federal Supreme Court in Karlsruhe cites from a May 2008 BND report, saying the agency “showed comprehensively” that “development work on nuclear weapons can be observed in Iran even after 2003.”

Unlikely Savior

Last night I happened to catch part of a History Detectives episode on PBS. It had to do with premature babies being exhibited as part of a sideshow at the 1933 and 1934 Chicago World’s Fair. (PDF transcript here)

At first, of course, the thought of a German doctor putting infants on display between Sally Rand and the freak show seems apalling. How stereotypical, I thought: A German. Fortunately they dug a bit deeper.

Until the middle part of the last century preemies had a very poor life expectancy. Most died in spite of efforts to keep them warm with blankets, hay, or being placed in shoe boxes next to stoves. Dr. Couney knew in the late 19th century that the new technology of incubators could save their lives.

But not only was the technology prohibitively expensive, most parents had their babies at home and didn’t trust them to doctors and nurses. So Couney faced a double challenge: To evangelize the technology and make it affordable. His solution was a brilliant example of how the free market saves lives.

Dr. William Silverman’s “Incubator-Baby Side Shows” Pediatrics 1979; 64:127-141. Dr. Silverman recounts the fascinating history of premature babies in incubators who were exhibited at World’s Fairs beginning in the late 19th century. An aspiring young actor named Archibald Leach worked as a barker outside one of these exhibits (“Don’t pass the babies by!”). He later acheived fame under his stage name — Cary Grant.

At the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933-4, the premature baby exhibit was next to the midway where Sally Rand and her fan dancers were performing. When police raided Sally Rand’s show she protested that her girls were wearing much more in the way of clothes than those babies next door. The article has *wonderful* pictures of very tiny preemies with their parents, nurses, doctors; it also shows old incubators, and various caregiving techniques including a very scary picture of “nasal spoon feeding.”

Another interesting article is by Dr. Jeffrey Baker “The Incubator Controversy: Pediatricians and the Origins of Premature Infant Technology in the United States, 1890 to 1910” Pediatrics 1991;87:654-662. Dr. Baker explains why many physicians and parents at first rejected the use of incubators (developed in France) because they considered them to be unhygienic and because most parents (who gave birth at home) were reluctant to entrust their babies to doctors for hospital care.

However, I have an article from the San Francisco Chronicle of 1902 entitled “What Becomes of the Incubator Babies?” that is far more upbeat about the use of incubators. It begins: “Nine years ago one of the curiosities of the World’s Fair at Chicago was a baby incubator in full operation, taking care of a prematurely born baby, one of those helpless little changelings brought into the world alive and breathing, yet before its time. It was exhibited as a curiousity, a thing of wonder. Today, to raise a prematurely born baby without the assistance of an incubator would be like dressing a wound without antiseptic precaution.

While many in the press lambasted Couney’s exhibits, parents and doctors backed him up. Not surprising, when you consider that he saved the lives of hundreds of their children with a technology they could not afford.

Once hospitals caught on, Couney stopped the exhibits. How’s that German Doctor stereotype holding up now?

Kurt Cobain (Rick) Rolling in His Grave

H/T: Mashable.

Chappaquiddick At 40

Some of us remember. Nobody should forget.

This manslaughter might have been forgiven if Kennedy hadn’t decided to evade responsibility for the accident and cover it up by failing to report it, trying to co-opt one of his aides to cop to being the driver, and then leaving them to try and fix it for him for over seven hours.

Worse, Mary Jo Kopechne, whose drowned body was found in a position trying to eke out the last molecules of air within the submerged car, was left to drown by the self-involved Senator, who chose not to seek immediate help.

And here’s a Google Commemorative Logo you won’t see.

Wouldn’t beat this classic anyway:

And That’s The Way It Is

Roger Kimball is completely on-target about all of this Walter Cronkite adulation.

He didn’t research or write the news. He read it. He emitted the same platitudes every other news reader mouthed. He did so, however, with a sort of cardigan authenticity that used car salesmen would climb naked over broken bottles to emulate.

…

Michael Jackson was famous for inventing a dance step called the moonwalk in which the dancer seems to float backwards while walking in place. Walter Cronkite did something similar. He seemed to float above the yapping clamor of common opinion. At bottom, though, he merely reflected it.

When I was a kid I liked Walter Cronkite. By the time I became an adult I knew he was a phony.

When Systemic Corruption Meets Fantasy

Here’s your eye-roller of the day.

Human Rights Deputy Director Craig Mokhiber lamented that even the utopian ideal the United Nations was formed around was considered, by some, science fiction. “We look at it in a different way,” Mokhiber explained. “It’s true that we are an idealistic organization… but we are focused on international law and diplomacy to settle disputes. We don’t see it as utopian, we see it as the only reasonable alternative to what inevitably would be a horrific dystopian society.”

Go on. Pull the other one.

Filthy Regime

Here’s what filthy Sharia Law gets you.

He said he had been a highly regarded member of the force, and had so “impressed my superiors” that, at 18, “I was given the ‘honor’ to temporarily marry young girls before they were sentenced to death.”

In the Islamic Republic it is illegal to execute a young woman, regardless of her crime, if she is a virgin, he explained. Therefore a “wedding” ceremony is conducted the night before the execution: The young girl is forced to have sexual intercourse with a prison guard – essentially raped by her “husband.”

Update:

Mark Steyn:

“It is illegal to execute a young woman …if she is a virgin”: Must be convenient to have a legal code that obliges all your pathologies.

The Moon We Forgot

Charles Krauthammer laments (and I with him).

Why do it? It’s not for practicality. We didn’t go to the moon to spin off cooling suits and freeze-dried fruit. Any technological return is a bonus, not a reason. We go for the wonder and glory of it. Or, to put it less grandly, for its immense possibilities. We choose to do such things, said JFK, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” And when you do such magnificently hard things — send sailing a Ferdinand Magellan or a Neil Armstrong — you open new human possibility in ways utterly unpredictable.

I’ll See Your Greatest Generation

And raise you one Henry Allingham.

“Henry was always determined to ensure that today’s generation does not forget the sacrifice of those who died on the Western Front,” St. Dunstan’s said in a statement after his death. “Until recently, he regularly visited schools and attended war-based events as an ambassador for his generation.”

Asked once at a memorial ceremony how he would like to be remembered, Allingham brushed off any thought of it, saying people should instead remember those who died in the wars.

“Remember them, not me,” he said.

Ronald Reagan Speaks to Our Day

Every argument is still valid.

There is, of course, an alternative to following the Gipper’s advice.

Update:

Glenn Beck has the good sense to surround himself with two smart, honest guys. Listen to what they have to say.

(I’m still amazed, but grateful, that Stossel has a job at ABC.)

Sarah Palin Declares War?

That’s how David Warren sees it.

Perhaps better terms for the two sides, to replace left and right, might be “martians” and “earthlings.”

It is to the earthlings in this scenario that Ms. Palin is speaking. And when she writes lines like this intentional jaw-dropper in the Washington Post — “We are ripe for economic growth and energy independence if we responsibly tap the resources that God created right underfoot on American soil” — she is quite intentionally signalling that she is ready for war.

Internet Security with the Pros

A coworker found this gem.

Yes sir, you are secure here.

A Reckless Congress

The WSJ on one of the greatest raids on private income in American history.

The article recites an astonishing list of tax increases and concludes:

We could go on, and we will in coming days. But the most remarkable quality of this health-care exercise is its reckless disregard for economic and fiscal reality. With the economy still far from a healthy recovery, and the federal fisc already nearly $2 trillion in deficit, Democrats want to ram through one of the greatest raids on private income and business in American history. The world is looking on, agog, and wondering why the United States seems intent on jumping off this cliff.

Hammer your representatives with the message that we do not want to be driven off that cliff. It would mean the end of the American experiment.

Chuck DeVore’s new campaign strategist

Is Barbara Boxer.

Viva Sonia

Mr. Spielberg, are you listening?

Adding Spice to the Menudo of Justice

Iowahawk is in fine fettle. But he should have used more malapropisms.

Update:

“This woman is Archie Bunker in a dress.”

Sometimes I Wonder

How many blacks support Planned Parenthood? And why?

Planned Parenthood founder and Leftist icon, Margaret Sanger, was not only a eugenicist, but a rather racist one.

In “Woman and the New Race,” Sanger insisted that women create an enormous “debt to society [by] creating slums, filling asylums with the insane, and institutions with other defectives. … Poverty and the large family generally go hand in hand. … The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”

Of blacks, Sanger wrote, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

Gee, ya think?

It just may turn out that current climate models are wrong.

“In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record,” says oceanographer Gerald Dickens, study co-author and professor of Earth Science at Rice University in Houston. “There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models.”

Again: I’m old enough to remember overpopulation, global cooling, DDT killing birds and the hole in the ozone. All bogus. Chicken Little has really been quite consistent.

It’s hard to confirm a model when you can’t even be sure of the data.

Did He Say This With A Straight Face?

The One, pontificating in Ghana:

“No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top…. No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. That is not democracy; that is tyranny, even if occasionally you sprinkle an election in there. And now is the time for that style of governance to end.”

Rush Limbaugh asks the right questions:

“Our government is soon going to be skimming 51 percent off the top of everything we make! What does that make Obama? Obama just kneecapped the auto industry. He just put the United Auto Workers in charge of on the board of directors and made ’em owners. What the hell is that?”

Well, Rush, I’ll explain. President Teleprompter meant to add “Do as I say, not as I do.” I swear that the Thug in Chief, especially with his handling of GM, reminds me more every day of another swell guy from Chicago. (The squeamish will want to stop that clip before the 2:00 mark.)

This One Goes To Eleven

It seems like the blink of an eye to me – albeit a slow blink – but it’s been four decades since Apollo 11. NASA will be observing the event with an audio webcast of the sound of the entire mission, starting at 7:32 EDT tomorrow morning. From their press release:

The audio retrospective will begin at 6:32 a.m.  CDT Thursday, July 16, two hours before the spacecraft launched. The audio  will continue through splashdown of the mission at 11:51 a.m. CDT Friday,  July 24, and recovery of the crew shortly afterward. The Web stream  will feature the communications between the astronauts and ground  teams, and commentary from Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center  in Houston.

Listen here.

More info on Apollo 11 40th anniversary observations here.

Dinner at the White House

A parable.

Once upon a time, I was invited to the White House for a private dinner with the President. I am a respected businessman, with a factory that produces memory chips for computers and portable electronics. There was some talk that my industry was being scrutinized by the administration, but I paid it no mind. I live in a free country. There’s nothing that the government can do to me if I’ve broken no laws. My wealth was earned honestly, and an invitation to dinner with an American President is an honor.

I checked my coat, was greeted by the Chief of Staff, and joined the President in a yellow dining room. We sat across from each other at a table draped in white linen. The Great Seal was embossed on the china. Uniformed staff served our dinner.

The meal was served, and I was startled when my waiter suddenly reached out, plucked a dinner roll off my plate, and began nibbling it as he walked back to the kitchen.

“Sorry about that,” said the President. “Andrew is very hungry.”

Read the whole thing.

Road Trip!

First Private Commercial Satellite Launch

SpaceX has done it.

Here’s the windup…

I’m not a baseball fan, so I’ll have to trust Andy McCarthy on this. Which I’m pretty comfortable doing. He’s certainly right about the video clips.

Though it’s not a widely appreciated fact, we right-winger sports nuts have long known that the sports press is among the media’s leftiest precincts.  So I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised at how little was said (as in nothing at all) about the reception President Obama received last night when he came out on the field to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at the baseball all-star game in St. Louis.  It was a packed house (over 50,000 in attendance), and the jeers were easily discernible.

Update:

Now it’s First-Pitchgate!

Another Oversimplification from the Republicans

It simply cannot be this uncomplicated.

Fixing the Kidney Shortage

Virginia Postrel has an excellent article at The Atlantic on what it would take to reduce the frightening backlog of people waiting for new kidneys: money. No, not increased government spending. In fact, it would be less. This is a good reminder of why money was invented in the first place: Barter doesn’t work very well.

You might think that such a superior treatment would be standard. But kidneys are hard to come by. In the United States, more than 80,000 people are on the official waiting list, all hoping that someone will die in just the right circumstances and bequeath them the “gift of life.” Last year, only 16,517 got transplants: 10,550 with the cadaver organs allocated through the list, and 5,967 from living donors. More than 4,000 on the list, or about 11 a day, died. And the list gets longer every year.

There should be no stigma associated with accepting money for donating a kidney.

The Emperor’s New Plumage

Charles Krauthammer says The Messiah likes his plumage.

Obama says that his START will be a great boon, setting an example to enable us to better pressure North Korea and Iran to give up their nuclear programs. That a man of Obama’s intelligence can believe such nonsense is beyond comprehension. There is not a shred of evidence that cuts by the great powers — the INF treaty, START I, the Treaty of Moscow (2002) — induced the curtailment of anyone’s programs. Moammar Gaddafi gave up his nukes the week we pulled Saddam Hussein out of his spider hole. No treaty involved. The very notion that Kim Jong Il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will suddenly abjure nukes because of yet another U.S.-Russian treaty is comical.

A lot of people talk about The One’s “intelligence”. I’d like to know why. What evidence have you seen that He is actually smart? I’ve seen plenty that he’s ruthless and perhaps clever, but the man’s a verbal cripple without a teleprompter (to a greater extent than W ever was) and His administration has been a non-stop string of blunders and gaffes. One coworker said He was “f-ing brilliant” because he edited the Harvard Law Review. But He didn’t write anything there.

Snobbish and full of himself, yes. Smart? Show me.

Back to Krauthammer:

Obama doesn’t even seem to understand the ramifications of this concession. Poland and the Czech Republic thought they were regaining their independence when they joined NATO under the protection of the United States. They now see that the shield negotiated with us and subsequently ratified by all of NATO is in limbo. Russia and America will first have to “come to terms” on the issue, explained President Dmitry Medvedev. This is precisely the kind of compromised sovereignty that Russia wants to impose on its ex-Soviet colonies — and that U.S. presidents of both parties for the past 20 years have resisted. (emphasis added)

Unions. Feh.

Unions are immoral. There are at least two reasons:

1. When two parties enter into a voluntary contract without fraud, no third party has any right to void that contract.
2. Violence is not an acceptable business practice, and violence is the only tool unions have.

This commercial, which the Union Thugs don’t want aired, sums up the violence they and their goons in congress want to do to both workers and employers.

Do or Die

Here’s an amazing story from Afghanistan, along with video. (Note: the squeamish may want to just read the story.)

Pfc. Channing Moss of the United States Army was serving in Afghanistan in March 2006 when disaster struck. His convoy was attacked by Taliban fighters with small arms and rocket propelled grenades. Moss, manning an MK 19 machine gun in the turret of his Humvee, was struck by an RPG — and survived.

Lawyers Writing Lawyer Jokes

You just can’t make this stuff up.

A lawyer in Florida filed a motion to force his rival to upgrade to newer shoes, on the grounds that his homely old hush puppies gave him an unfair advantage by projecting an air of unsophisticated honesty to the jury.

Speaking of lawyers, I had some fun recently with a class-action lawsuit notice that came in the mail. The lawyers wanted my permission to get information regarding certain transactions between me and my insurance company, pending the suit being named a class action. There were two forms, one to agree and one to object.

I filled out the objection form, naturally. Where it asked for reasons I wrote:

a) I expect all my transactions to be private. b) I am opposed to class action lawsuits in general. c) I think that trial lawyers are poo-poo heads.

I hope that has to get read aloud at some legal proceeding or another.